LDS Church President Dallin Oaks makes a controversial pick for new apostle: Clark Gilbert

Four months into his tenure as president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dallin H. Oaks has made one of his most consequential and, frankly, controversial moves as leader of the global faith.

He picked Clark G. Gilbert as the newest apostle, a lifetime appointment the church announced Thursday.

Gilbert, the faith’s commissioner of education, has gained a reputation as a culture warrior, eager to defend and define orthodoxy, while combating the rise of secularism, especially at church-owned schools.

He fills the seat left vacant by the December death of another educator, apostle Jeffrey R. Holland.

The 55-year-old Gilbert was called Wednesday and ordained Thursday by Oaks and the other members of the governing First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, according to a news release. He has served as a general authority Seventy since April 2021 and as education commissioner since August 2021.

“This is an amazing time to point people to the Savior Jesus Christ,” Gilbert said in the release. “When we do that, we can find joy and comfort and peace in him. As [former church] President [Russell M.] Nelson once said, it’s much harder to find happiness where it doesn’t exist. And we’re so grateful that I have this calling now to witness that Jesus is the Christ. If people all across the world will look to him, he will make their lives better, more meaningful, more joyful. And it happens in and through our Savior Jesus Christ.”

Gilbert’s elevation is Oaks’ second apostolic selection. In November, a little more than a month after Nelson died, he chose Gérald Caussé, a 62-year-old Frenchman known for his ecclesiastical oversight of the faith’s financial empire and his support of environmental stewardship and sustainability.

A passion for education

Gilbert has focused in his life on twin passions: his church and education.

During his childhood in Oakland, California, and Phoenix, Gilbert said his parents taught him that the two were intertwined rather than in conflict.

“They never made me think that education and the gospel were decoupled in any way,” he said in 2021. “The more you have faith, the more you want to learn and grow, and the more you learn and grow, the deeper your faith can become.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree from church-owned Brigham Young University in 1994 in international relations, followed by a master’s in Asian studies from Stanford and doctorate in business administration from Harvard, where he ultimately joined the faculty.

In 2006, Gilbert’s Harvard mentor, Kim Clark, tapped him to come to BYU-Idaho and “help us rethink church education on a global scale.”

A few years later, he jumped to the church-owned Deseret News, where he laid off more than 80 full- and part-time employees in favor of a new strategy that relied heavily on volunteer contributors.

In 2015, he returned to BYU-Idaho, where he followed Clark as president. Two years later, he helped create and led a global online education program known as BYU-Pathway Worldwide.

When he rose to church education commissioner, he oversaw all the BYU campuses, along with the faith’s seminaries and Institutes of Religion.

Throughout his educational leadership, Gilbert taught that “in this church, we believe in the divine potential of all of God’s children,” the release said, “and in our ability to become something more in Christ.”

A strict kind of orthodoxy

As overseer of BYU, critics say, Gilbert implemented strict policies to weed out faculty members who didn’t support a certain approach to Latter-day Saint scriptures, practices and orthodoxy — particularly on women, families and LGBTQ+ issues. That led to widespread feelings of fear and anxiety, a number of professors told The Salt Lake Tribune last year.

“Clark Gilbert may be the most consequential apostolic appointment in the modern church,” Latter-day Saint historian Benjamin Park said Thursday. “As manager of the Deseret News, president of BYU-Idaho and commissioner of education, his most common refrain has been to double down on fundamental principles, avoid modern encroachments, and reaffirm exceptionalism claims.”

In his public addresses, Gilbert has frequently “critiqued modern institutions for losing their spiritual core and giving in to secularism,” Park said. “He has developed a widespread reputation among BYU-system faculty for his conservative beliefs, distrust of contemporary academia and eagerness to exert an intervening hand.”

Perhaps not since the appointment of conservatives J. Reuben Clark or Ezra Taft Benson, the historian said, “has someone joined the Quorum of the Twelve with such a prominent record for speaking out on culture war issues and charting out a position of retrenchment.”

Indeed, said a current BYU professor who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal from the school, “there is lots of shock and despair as faculty reach out to one another upon hearing the news” of Clark’s new calling.

For his part, Gilbert has warned that secular agendas are striving to thwart the spiritual progression of faith-driven organizations. He sees BYU’s “unique mission” — to cultivate religious faith in classrooms and across the campus — as a way to counter those influences.

“From time to time, questions about our ability to realize this mission surface,” Gilbert told faculty members in August. “These concerns are not without merit. This does not reflect a lack of confidence in you [the faculty], but a recognition that what we have asked you to do is hard.”

Emily Jensen, web editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, worries, however, about the status of women, given Gilbert’s hiring record at BYU.

“Women who would be up for a position would not get that position, and it seemed to stop at him,” Jensen said. “We do not know exactly why or how hiring decisions were made, but it seemed like he was the stopping point for a lot of women obtaining positions of authority in church education. And that’s disappointing because we have a prophet who seems interested in discussing how women use their authority within the church.”

Jensen was also disappointed that Oaks didn’t use this opportunity to appoint the faith’s first Black apostle.

“There’s some amazing Black members of the Seventy who seemed ready to go in that position,” she said, “and that did not happen.”

Others view Gilbert as a great choice.

“I have known Elder Gilbert since we were in a student government together at BYU and [his wife, Christine] since we grew up together in the same Provo stake [a regional cluster of Latter-day Saint congregations],” said Steve Densley, a contributor to FAIR, a pro-church group. “I have always found them to be kind, friendly, intelligent and committed to the gospel. I am sure they will make great leaders.”

A new role

Now Gilbert joins the church’s most elite group of leaders.

Latter-day Saint apostles are “special witnesses of the name of Christ throughout the world,” the church’s release explains. “They also engage in significant administrative responsibilities, overseeing the operation and development of a global faith.”

The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is the church’s second-highest-ranking body — after the First Presidency. The longest-serving apostle becomes the prophet-president, meaning Gilbert could one day ascend to the highest position.

On top of his education and career, Gilbert served a Latter-day Saint mission in Kobe, Japan, and later in local congregations as an elders quorum president, counselor in a stake presidency, bishop and area Seventy.

He and Christine married in the Salt Lake Temple in 1994 and are the parents of eight children.